


Project HuXLEY

by Bigsisnat533



Category: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: (It's complicated.), Alternate Universe - Human, Dubious Science, Elements of Brave New World, GLaDOS is still a separate person from Caroline, Gen, Human Experimentation, Lab Grown Humans, Multiformat, Not Canon Compliant, non-linear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26720827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bigsisnat533/pseuds/Bigsisnat533
Summary: In one of the back rooms one of Aperture’s basement levels, just above the condemned “old Aperture” levels and just underneath the main space of the Enrichment Center, fifty different failed attempts at brain transplants lay in different states ranging from being prepared for disposal to sitting in storage, waiting for a better use.In an adjacent room, there are tables littered with test tubes and bottles of all different sizes, some still filled with biological material from abandoned experiments, as well as a handful of bodies sitting in cryogenic storage, just like Caroline. The lights in the room, which once glowed a warm, sinister red have been off for years, inorganic blood-surrogate still sticky on the floor where it had been spilt.~*~A collection of disjointed short stories, character profiles, and lab reports from a universe where Caroline was transferred into a new human body instead of a computer. Basically, it's my take on how exactly a human version of GLaDOS could exist while keeping her relationship with Caroline the same. Inspired by Aldous Huxley'sBrave New World. Prior knowledge of that book isn't important to understanding this work.
Kudos: 10





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this design for a human GLaDOS I made over on Amino: https://aminoapps.com/c/portal/page/blog/adding-to-the-pool-of-human-glados-designs-extras/g0pw_EV8F6uGgn7bXMWE7DR27oednxbzP73
> 
> I'm awful at finishing fully-plotted stories, but I have a lot of ideas about what this universe would be like (although they're a bit disjointed), so instead of writing out a whole story, I'm just going to put those ideas in here in various formats.

### Project HuXLEY (Human Xenobiology Laboratory for Endless Youth)

Goal: Successful transfer of human consciousness into a new host body

**Methods Tried:**

  * Full brain transplant from one adult to another
  * Non-physical transfer of consciousness from one adult to another
  * Non-physical transfer of consciousness from one adult to a synthetically bred adult with advanced maturity rate
  * Non-physical transfer of consciousness from one adult to a synthetically bred baby with advanced maturity rate



* * *

**Notes:**

1991-09-27: Transfer of consciousness into a synthetically bred adult seems most promising. Body should be conditioned to have as mild a personality as possible, while still being of advanced enough intelligence as to not dull the mind of the incomer. Those transferred into a body sharing some of their own genetic material have had the highest success rates. Currently, Project HuXLEY has only enough funding and resources to create one more vessel.

1992-06-20: Final host body (ID: 717697687983) has been decanted and is being transferred to Relaxation Vaults for care and intermittent conditioning. The Hatchery has been shut down indefinitely.

1996-06-20: Host 717697687983 has reached sexual maturity. It has shown no signs of defiance or strong personality and its conditioning has been progressing smoothly. Its intelligence has surpassed the benchmark for its current age. Things are looking promising.

1998-06-20: Host 717697687983 is now fully grown. Unlike earlier prototypes, it has reached the intelligence benchmark set for its age, which should avoid any averse effects to the incomer's own intelligence. Host 717697687983 continues to show a weak, passive personality. It should fade into the background once the incomer is transferred. Caroline will be brought out of stasis next week for her mandatory wellness exercises and placed into short-term relaxation until the host is fully prepared.

1998-06-24: Aside from the preexisting illness, Caroline has shown no averse effects from long-term relaxation and has passed her wellness exercises. The transfer is set for 06-26. Host 717697687983 has gone quietly into short-term relaxation as final preparations are put into place.

1998-06-26: Caroline has successfully been transferred into the host. Current results from testing are promising. Host has accepted Caroline as the dominant personality. Intelligence measurements seem stable. 

1999-01-02: Subject has stopped responding to the name Caroline and has begun to show signs of defiance, as well as startling personality changes. Further testing is required. Until then, the subject has been placed in short-term relaxation.

ERROR:  Something has gone wrong.

2000-07-06: Aperture Laboratories is fully functional. Testing of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device will begin immediately.


	2. Awakening

_“If I die before you people can put me in a new body or find the secret to immortality, I want Caroline to run the place.”_ – Cave Johnson, PR-AU03 (Earth-5912228346)

~*~

Mr. Johnson wasn’t the only one to get sick after creating Conversion Gel from moon rocks. He certainly wasn’t concerned about the test subjects who got ill, and although it was rather inconvenient for Aperture, wasn’t that distraught over the poor scientists who had been poisoned right along with him. He had sent them on a quest to find a way to prolong his life, find him a new vessel, and that had been it. He wasn’t entirely sure how they’d interpreted that request—there’s only so much focusing one can do when they’re in pain from moon rock poisoning—but he knew that being able to freeze a person and then bring them back from cryogenesis was on the table. 

Mr. Johnson was gone before the lab boys figured it out. As he prepared Caroline to take on his duties as CEO—hell, with his health, she was already most of the way there by the time of his passing—he began to notice the signs in her, too. The beginnings of a cough. Shortness of breath. The subtle cues in her facial expressions that told him she was in pain too. 

Caroline was put into storage not too terribly long after Mr. Johnson’s demise, as soon as the scientists were sure that they could get her back out when the time came. In the years that followed, they continued on the quest given to them by a dead man in order to save his beloved assistant.

~*~

In one of the back rooms one of Aperture’s basement levels, just above the condemned “old Aperture” levels and just underneath the main space of the Enrichment Center, fifty different failed attempts at brain transplants lay in different states ranging from being prepared for disposal to sitting in storage, waiting for a better use. 

It had quickly become apparent to the scientists that transplanting the whole brain into a new host body was far too finicky a process. At best, it had worked for a few days; at worst, the subject died during the operation. Either way, they hadn’t yet found a way to transplant the whole brain into a new body without it facing rejection. 

One of their more successful transfers had been a young intern, whom they’d merged with the new host body, in a sense, rather than outright replacing the person who was already there. She’d wound up relatively confused, producing an unending stream of questions upon awakening, and certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was a step in the right direction. Using a body with an existing personality had proved to be rather confusing, though, since both individuals existed in that body in one way or another—further tests discovered that a host body with too strong of a personality would overpower the person they were trying to transfer. 

In an adjacent room, there are tables littered with test tubes and bottles of all different sizes, some still filled with biological material from abandoned experiments, as well as a handful of bodies sitting in cryogenic storage, just like Caroline. The lights in the room, which once glowed a warm, sinister red have been off for years, inorganic blood-surrogate still sticky on the floor where it had been spilt. 

Upon finding that transferring the consciousness of one person into another with a strong personality was a problem, the next idea was to grow their own human beings, ones they could control—maybe even transfer a person into a baby, before it ever has a chance to develop a personality of its own, and then find a way to speed up its aging. 

The scientists took a leaf out of Aldous Huxley’s _Brave New World_ , developing babies in bottles and decanting them as soon as they were old enough. Their first few attempts were unsuccessful, and the few in the middle aged far too slowly for their purposes, but for a little while they were able to replicate the novel’s fantastic descriptions of human beings who were mature at four and fully grown at six years old. Transferring a person’s consciousness into one of these bodies proved ineffective in various ways as well. 

Putting someone into one of these bodies and letting them grow up in it tended to produce a human being with a one-track mind, useless people spouting off nothing but incorrect facts, or gibberish about space, or inedible cake recipes. The products from those experiments had been put into storage with the others. Putting someone into one of these bodies after it had grown dulled their intelligence. Like in Huxley’s novel, the scientists found that these bodies were utterly useless before the transfer, having no time between infancy and adulthood to learn anything. Unfortunately, transferring someone to one of these bodies didn’t overwrite the host’s mind, instead combining the two—in the case of their intelligence, it was like adding a negative number to a positive one. 

The intern who’d been their test subject for the latter procedure had retained all of his personality, though. His only stumbling block was the effect on his intelligence, but with all of the time that had passed between Caroline being put into storage and the intern being transferred, it was as good as they were going to get. Aperture had been running for years with no official CEO by the time the intern was transferred—Caroline was not truly dead, after all, and the company had been left to her—and was quickly running out of resources, money, and willing participants for the Consciousness Transfer experiments. One last body had been created before shutting down the Hatchery, for Caroline, and she was going to be put in it whether it worked or not.

~*~

“Mary Shelley’s most famous novel emphasizes the need for a balance between the emotional, anti-rational sentiments of the Romantic period and the relentless pursuit of knowledge from the Enlightenment,” a young Aperture science intern says cryptically, a terse frown marring her face. “Its protagonist failed to temper his pursuit of knowledge with moral considerations and was driven to despair by his own experiment. Remember that.” 

“Shut up and watch that monitor,” the scientist, a gruff man in his mid-40s says, not even turning to look at her.

The intern, a young college student majoring in biochemistry and minoring in English literature, stands with scientist in a small observation room overlooking a much larger, circular chamber. She looks down at what’s going on in the room below, reclipping a strand of pale blonde hair back behind her ear and staring at the figure under the sheet on the floor below for a moment longer, before turning back to the computer in front of her. 

The monitor displays the vital signs of both the body under the sheet and those of Caroline, thawed out but still unconscious. Both are stable.   
The body under the sheet is the last one that was created in the Hatchery, the one intended to host Caroline. It was created at least partially with Caroline’s own genetic material, in hopes that there’d be less chance of rejection. In the years it had spent maturing, it had been conditioned to be as blank as possible, while still being reasonably intelligent so as to not hinder Caroline after the transfer. If things go correctly, Caroline will be the dominant (or even only) personality. So far, things looked promising, as the body hadn’t tried to do or learn anything it hadn’t been told, not even naming itself up until this point and retaining a simple identification label. 

The scientists in the circular room shoot a thumbs up at the two sitting in the observation room. Caroline sits to the left of the new body, wide awake now and looking apprehensive. They’d found that a person’s consciousness transferred best and most fully when they were awake and alert. She’s connected to her new host by half a dozen different wires and cables. She coughs and winces at the pain in her chest. It’s time to go. 

The scientist in the observation room types a few commands into the computer, then nods. He places his hand on the red button at one end of the desk. “Let’s fire it up, Rettur.”

The intern takes one last glance at the room below, then the monitor, and places her hand on her own red button. The two press them in tandem. 

A deafening scream fills the area, echoing on the circular walls of the chamber as Caroline is ripped from her body.

It’s horrible, the intern thinks, absolutely dreadful, so much that she can’t conceive it in words. She knows they’ve just made a huge mistake, and there’s nothing she can do. 

The screaming ends and Caroline’s body goes limp, empty, her mind having been taken out of it. The host body stirs, then bolts upright, and the scientists scramble to calm her down. The intern can’t hear a word they’re saying from her position.

The woman in the chamber below looks at her hands, turning them over, her heart rate beginning to slow to a normal pace as the scientists unhook her from the cables connecting her to her old body. The new one has a strong resemblance to the old one: high cheekbones, long, dark hair, and an impressive height (although the new body is taller than Caroline ever was before, a side effect of its advanced aging combined with the genetic material it was created with). Its facial features are much sharper, though, and its eyes are a lighter amber color in contrast to Caroline’s dark brown ones. A passerby might have said they were sisters. 

The scientists help her to her feet, relishing in their success and already making plans for a party. A few of them are at Caroline’s side, discussing the matter of her being the CEO. A few others move her old body to be disposed of, since it’s no longer needed. (A scientist at the back of the room halts them and suggests that they put it back into storage to be studied later. The two carrying the body agree, complimenting him on the clever idea. It’s always good to save resources.)

That night, everyone involved with Project HuXLEY celebrates their triumph with a round of drinks and a slice of cake for everybody. The intern sits at the fringes of the party with a glass of sparkling grape juice, still feeling uneasy about the whole thing. Caroline, in her new body, sits at the center of attention with a glass of wine and a slice of cake, finding it easy to ignore the quiet little voice of Host 717697687983 in the back of her mind.

The project has been a huge success.


	3. Employee Profile: Sybil Rettur

Name: Sybil Rettur

Age: 31

Position: Unpaid Intern ([former] College Student)

Notes: Helpful around the lab, but frequently confusing and cryptic. Makes constant references to classic literature. Useful in the early stages of the final portion of Project HuXLEY, but became stubborn as Host 717697687983 began conditioning and Caroline was prepared for transfer. 

Despite her proclivity for warning against certain tests, she is desperate enough to stick around. Good physical condition, but not a good candidate for testing of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Could be useful to use as base genetic material in the reopening of the Hatchery Lab, and has some knowledge of its uses. 

* * *

Sybil Rettur is an unpaid intern (sort of) working at Aperture Science. She had been a Biochemistry major at Northern Michigan University, with a minor in English (focusing on literature). Although an internship was not a requirement for her degree, she wanted to do one for credit. Aperture Science was the most zealous (and perhaps desperate) company looking for unpaid work at the time, and they believed Sybil would be helpful in Project HuXLEY. She began work at Aperture Science in 1998 and was 20 years old at the time. Her internship was originally only going to last for one year, but when problems began to arise with Caroline, she decided to stay with them for another year, to help resolve the problem.

Following the events around the year 2000, Sybil was roped into working with the company for at least another 7 years. Although her title of “intern” never changed, she was forced to drop her studies at NMU. (Also, many employees were forced into living in the facility, due to the need for rigorous testing: Sybil was one of them, effectively disappearing.) Sybil did not do tests related to the ASHPD and was instead coerced into continuing Project HuXLEY (albeit for different means), working in the Hatchery Lab. Her genetic material was taken and was used in the first successful Bokanovsky Group (copying the description in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). They would later be used as security around the facility and obstacles in ASHPD testing. 

Sybil herself, though, was not used for either of these purposes: unlike her veritable clones, she had not been conditioned as a security sentry or testing element and refused to work as such--even under threat of incineration. (This threat would not be carried out for many more years, however, as she was still useful to the company for the first few years, and then the facility was sent into ruin.)

In 2007, an incident occurred which would send the Enrichment Center into ruin. Instead of using this as an opportunity to escape, Sybil stuck around to try and help the other poor souls who had been stuck in the facility following the events in 2000. When her boss was reawakened, the previously mentioned threat of incineration was nearly carried out; Sybil was only saved by a chance meeting with a certain test subject…


	4. Origins of an Oracle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story of Sybil Rettur as proper prose, focusing on the creation of the human sentry turret equivalents. This was originally written for a contest on Amino, hence some of the repeat exposition (e.g. describing Gladys's appearance again). If you saw it on there, you might notice that the ending is a little different--that's because I realized the original timeline of this short story didn't fit with the one I outlined in Sybil's character profile.

The 20-year-old Aperture Science intern laid on the table, still as a corpse, save for the soft rise and fall of her chest. The intern, Sybil Rettur, was solidly unconscious, kept under by the same patented blend of aerosol chemicals that allowed subjects to stay in extended relaxation. She was outfitted in a simple blue hospital gown, her short blonde hair clipped carefully out of her face. 

The head of the facility looked down at the intern—her most recent test subject—and marked down a few notes on the form in her hands. Gladys, the facility head, was a tall, stately woman who looked like a pale shadow of the woman whose genetic code she inherited. She had the same fair skin as her predecessor, if not a few shades paler from never seeing real sunlight, and shared the same high cheekbones. Her facial features were much sharper, though, and her eyes were a golden amber color, rather than dark brown. Her hair, once long and dark like the woman she was supposed to be hosting, was tied up out of her face and had recently been dyed a stark white. She was Gladys, after all, not Caroline. 

She rolled up the sleeves of her lab coat, carefully tugged on a pair of sterile gloves, and set to work collecting cells from the unconscious intern. Thankfully, Sybil was one of the few Aperture Science employees who hadn’t been around long enough to have been rendered infertile by the toxic slew of lunar sediment, asbestos, and other carelessly stored chemicals that they were exposed to on a daily basis. She took eggs first—that was an easy enough process, especially since Gladys had been slipping the girl fertility drugs over the last few weeks—and then stem cells. She carried out her work with all of the precision of a computer and finished in under an hour. After transferring Sibyl to a temporary relaxation vault to wake up and recover, Gladys brought the vials of cells down to be stored pending Bokanovskification.

The outer Hatchery Lab door opened with a hiss, a small cloud of fog forming thanks to the temperature difference between the room’s cold interior and the much warmer hallway. Red light spilled into the hallways as Gladys stepped inside. She had been hard at work cleaning up the Hatchery Lab—after Aperture had run out of funding for the project, it had been hastily abandoned. It had been a right mess the first time Gladys had set foot in it—sticky blood surrogate spilled on the floors and never cleaned up, slimy patches of miscellaneous testing gels covering surfaces, test tubes and bottles that were filled but never reached decanting—and that wouldn’t have done at all for her purposes.

Although Gladys never allowed employees to be in charge of anything whose failure could jeopardize the order of the facility as a rule, she did concede that more hands were required for it to run at optimum efficiency. That’s where the Hatchery Lab came in: she couldn’t afford to hire outside employees, and since Aperture technology had already been stolen by spies, she couldn’t trust them anyway. The easiest solution was to make more humans of her own. Bokanovsky’s process, another figment from Aldous Huxley’s _Brave New World_ —the same book that she was a product of, in a way—would be essential if it worked. Gladys only had a handful of humans around, after all, and few of them were viable for reproduction. But if she could recreate Huxley’s grand ideas of producing 96 identical humans from one egg, she would have enough employees to last her for forever—not to mention plenty of new host bodies to transfer her consciousness into when her current one aged. She would become the most massive collection of wisdom to ever exist*, and Aperture would be her empire.

With Aperture Science’s proclivity for making the impossible possible and their attitude of throwing science at the wall to see what stuck*, it was no surprise that Gladys eventually got the result she was looking for. In the following years, Aperture Science was once more a hive of activity, with new cloned employees being effectively manufactured regularly. The old Employee Daycare Center had been repurposed into Aperture’s realization of Huxley’s fictional Conditioning Centre, with hypnotic messages being whispered to the identical batches of children each night. Those who had been created as clones of Sybil—formed through artificially-induced parthenogenesis and careful control of their development—were to be used primarily for the security of the facility. Like Gladys herself, these clones were fully mature by only 6 years old, using the techniques perfected by her predecessors.

“Aldous Huxley’s _Brave New World_ was intended as a warning against the extreme of over-organization and an amoral society,” Sybil Rettur said from her place behind Gladys one day in 2011, watching as the facility head swept through the Hatchery Lab to restart its operations. “Its characters become inhuman and miserable, ending the novel in tragedy. Remember that.”

Sybil had spent the previous 11 years whispering similar cryptic warnings and literary references, much to Gladys’s chagrin—footage from the security cameras proved that the intern hadn’t stopped even when Gladys had been in her coma.

“I’m not kidding, you know,” the white-haired woman said, her hands going still as she turned to glare at the intern. “If you continue to do nothing but spout off inane comments, I _will_ incinerate you.”

“It won’t be enough,” came Sybil’s reply, her airy tone suggesting that threat had gone over her head and she was simply muttering more gibberish. Then, after a pause, “Don’t make lemonade.”

Memories of Aperture’s last CEO—Caroline’s memories, no doubt—flooded unbidden into Gladys’s head. That hadn’t happened in a long time; Gladys had thought she’d thoroughly suppressed Caroline’s consciousness as she’d forged her own identity.

As the unpaid intern tumbled unceremoniously down the chute of the Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator and towards the flames and redemption lines below, Gladys swore she saw the younger woman wink.

“Don’t forget.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Both of these lines are adapted from dialogue in _Portal 2_. The first one is from a deleted GLaDOS line; the second is something Cave Johnson says.


End file.
